Текст книги "Brush Back"

Автор книги: Sara Paretsky

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

IN THE MADHOUSE

My seat used to be up near the rafters, where the noise shook one’s bones. Seventeen thousand fans slamming our chairs up and down, stomping, screaming, whistling, while the foghorn under the scoreboard bellowed whenever Steve Larmer or Boom-Boom scored. The Madhouse on Madison, it was called, and rightly so—decibel level around 130 on average, up to 300 when all the noisemakers were turned on. The sound coming from the rafters could push skaters to their knees.

They tore down the old Stadium about the time injuries forced my cousin into retirement. Just as well—he was superstitious about his success and hadn’t wanted to play in the fancy new place. Tonight, sinking into a plush red seat, I kind of agreed with Boom-Boom. I didn’t want my eardrums shattered, but I missed being right on top of the ice the way you were at the Stadium. The brightly smiling attendants, poised to bring us everything from name-brand cocktails to lobster rolls, made me perversely long for the Stadium’s cheap beer and pretzels, even though I don’t like beer.

The teams were skating warm-ups when I got there. Pierre had invited me to a pre-game dinner with his daughter and some of his old pals from the team, but I’d had to skip that: I’d gone with Conrad and one of his officers to talk to Viola before she left Ajax for the day. We’d done it the right way, gone through corporate HR, corporate security, explained she was dealing with a stalker and we wanted to guarantee her safety to and from the workplace.

Her supervisor turned out to be helpful, even supportive: Viola’s twin might not shine on the job but Viola worked hard and seemed to be a popular member of her unit, at least until the last week or two when she’d become erratic. If she was dealing with a stalker, that explained everything and the company would be glad to help.

Viola wasn’t quite as grateful. She accused me of betraying her trust, then, when I told her I knew she’d received threats of reprisals if she didn’t reveal her brother’s location, she accused me of listening in on her phone calls.

Conrad, at his gentlest, most avuncular, was finally able to persuade her to tell what she knew, although it wasn’t much. He coaxed her into describing the threatening phone calls, but Viola didn’t know who’d been making them. She kept insisting that she knew nothing about what Sebastian had agreed to do for Jerry Fugher, and no idea where her twin might be. She also resisted a police escort to her apartment.

“Don’t you see? They’ll know I went to the police if they see you. They already know I went to Vic. No police, they keep telling me, or they’ll kill me, and what’s to stop them murdering me now? They know where I work, they know where I live.”

She looked at me, her amber eyes once again flooded with tears. Just keeping her in Kleenex was going to bankrupt me.

“You want me dead,” she sobbed. “You’re not really trying to find Sebastian, if I’m dead you won’t have to look for him anymore.”

“She has a point,” I said to Conrad. “Unless you can put a twenty-four/seven detail on her, she’ll be vulnerable as soon as your officer leaves.”

Conrad smacked his thigh, frustrated. “And you can afford to guard her?”

We hashed it over for some time. The only solution we came up with was cumbersome and highly dependent on luck, but in the end, I drove Viola home to pack a suitcase. Conrad trailed us discreetly and hovered a few blocks away until Tom Streeter picked up Viola.

Once they were gone, I drove back to Conrad, who got out of the car to say that a Harley had buzzed the street a few times, but he hadn’t been able to pick up the plate without revealing he was watching.

“You look after yourself, Ms. W. That broken nose doesn’t help your looks any, and a bullet in the chest would definitely reduce your sex appeal, okay?”

The morning had started with Vince Bagby inviting me to dinner. Now Conrad was admiring my sex appeal. Despite the day’s traumas, I drove to the United Center in a cheerful mood.

Pierre was surrounded by old friends and old fans when I got there, while Bernie sat listening to music and texting, looking up only when Pierre pulled out one of her earbuds to introduce her to someone. She gave me a nervous smile, but pulled herself together to ask after Mr. Contreras and the dogs. She was wearing one of Boom-Boom’s jerseys—I’d given it to Pierre after my cousin died, and Bernie was swimming in it. To show that her loyalties lay with her father and her home country, she’d put on earrings with the Canadiens’ logo—the flattened C embracing an H—done in red and blue enamel.

Once the game got under way, father and daughter both focused on the ice. I didn’t recognize the current crop of players on either team—I hadn’t paid much attention to hockey after Boom-Boom’s death, although the Hawks were always generous with tickets whenever I wanted to come.

I tried to focus on the action, but about halfway through the first period, I realized Bernie was paying more attention to me than the game. As soon as she saw me looking at her, she turned red and picked up Pierre’s binoculars to stare at the ice.

“What’s up?” I asked her as Toews and the rest chased the puck to the far end.

She pretended to be too focused on the game to hear me, but the tightness in her shoulders told a different story.

At the end of the first period, Pierre took her with him down to the Blackhawks bench. Since he was scouting now for a rival team, he couldn’t go into the locker room, but I watched him talking to the front office staff, introducing Bernie, who flashed the family’s famous smile.

Someone handed Bernie a stick. She walked out onto the perimeter of the rink and showed off her form. After a certain amount of confabbing and gesturing, someone escorted Bernie to center ice to play the game of “Shoot the Puck”: a board is placed in front of the goal with three slots in the bottom and contestants—usually drawn randomly from the crowd—get three chances to put the puck through a slot.

A woman from media relations was there with a mike, talking to each of the contestants before they addressed the puck. When it was Bernie’s turn, the woman said, “I see you are wearing Boom-Boom Warshawski’s number, even though your dad is with the Canadiens.”

“Boom-Boom was my godfather,” Bernie announced into the microphone. “I wear his number tonight and dedicate my shooting to his memory. Some ignorant people try to deface his reputation, but me, I am proud to show my support of him in public.”

The remark was so pointed, I figured it explained the tenseness she’d been exhibiting in the stands—she must have been planning to toss this barb my way.

The crowd went wild over Bernie when they caught on to her connection to Blackhawks royalty. The cheering and catcalls grew almost to old Stadium decibels. Bernie waved a quick, shy hand, but looked at her feet, not the audience, while the other three contestants took their turns.

When it was Bernie’s time to shoot, she treated the matter with total seriousness, adjusting her stick as if it were a golf club. The puck sailed through the center slot as if someone were pulling it on a string. Bernie permitted herself a small tight smile, bowed briefly to the cheering audience and scurried off the ice, where Pierre was waiting to hug her. The Blackhawks brass slapped her on the shoulders. I could imagine the threadbare comments: too bad the NHL doesn’t let women try out, we’d put you on one of our affiliate teams right away.

I left the stands to join a line for the women’s toilets. By the time I got back to my seat, the second period had started. Pierre and Bernie apparently had accepted an invitation to sit with the Blackhawks officers: their seats were empty, but I saw Pierre in the row of seats right behind the players’ bench. I picked up the binoculars that he’d left on his seat. No Bernie. Bathroom break, maybe. I sat uneasily for half a minute, then texted her.

About halfway into the second period, when she hadn’t responded to that or to my second text, I headed to the ground floor. The entrance to the floor-level seats was blocked by security staff who demanded a ticket that gave me the right to enter. I opened my mouth to argue, decided that was futile and gave a small scream instead.

“A rat! A rat just ran right over my feet—oh, horrible—look—look, it’s over there!”

I pointed dramatically. The three guards couldn’t help following my arm, which gave me a second to duck around the barrier and run into the stands. I pushed and shoved my way past annoyed fans and squawking security staff to the row of seats behind the Blackhawks bench.

“Pierre! Pierre!” I had to shout his name a half dozen times before someone heard me over the fan noise. The guards had caught up with me and were trying to wrestle me away when he turned and saw me struggling in their arms.

He tried to come to me, couldn’t get by the glass barrier separating the team from the crowd, and shook one of the manager’s arms. By this time, the guards had managed to drag me past the excited spectators to one of the aisles. What a wonderful night of violence, even better than a fight on the rink, guard versus berserk fan right in front of them.

Before the guards could turn me over to the Chicago police, Pierre arrived—he’d had to go through the tunnel into the dressing room and then up and around behind me. Someone from the Hawks was with him, explaining to the guards that I was a friend of Pierre’s.

“Vic, what is it? Bernadine, she is ill?”

“Where is Bernadine?” I demanded.

“But—with you. She is saying my old friends are trop ennuyants, she is wanting to watch the game—”

“No,” I said flatly. “She’s gone.”

“But—where? Maybe she is in the toilets?”

“She hasn’t been around since the second period started. It’s been a good twenty minutes, maybe more.”

“No,” he whispered. He grabbed his binoculars from me to inspect the section where we’d been sitting, but the three seats remained empty.

I looked around despairingly: twenty-one thousand fans, another thousand or more guards, press, you can’t search a building like this. Not much in the way of security cameras, either.

“Get the head of security,” I said to the guards who’d just been holding me. “Let’s see what we can do. She was on camera for ‘Shoot the Puck,’ and everyone paid attention because she’s Pierre’s daughter. If she left the building, or someone took– Anyway, you can alert everyone in security to look for her, or report whether they saw her, right?”

The man from the Blackhawks management who’d come up with Pierre nodded at the guards. “Get that going now, guys. Pierre, if she’s here, we’ll find her.”

I called Conrad Rawlings on his personal cell. “We don’t know what happened to her, whether she left on her own, or if Nabiyev or Bagby had someone here waiting for a chance to get her on her own.”

Conrad took the few details I had, promised to call Bobby to see what resources the department could put into a search. “Don’t beat yourself up, Ms. W.,” he added. “Slows down the investigation. You got a current photo you can text?”

“YouTube. Tonight’s ‘Shoot the Puck.’”

The next hour was a blur of frantic, useless activity. The security crew did a crowd scan with their fan cams, trying to match Bernie’s face to anyone in the stands. I joined two women staffers to search the women’s toilets. I felt dull, empty, while my body moved to staircases, ramps, hidden elevators, dark spaces under the rafters, all against the backdrop of the organ, the screams from fans, the blare of foghorns. My injured eye and nose were aching. The pain forced me to know this was happening now, in the body, not some dream from which I might mercifully awaken.

The woman from security I was working with got a call on her radio: they’d found a gate attendant who was pretty sure he’d seen Bernie leave. We all rushed down to the security office, where the Stadium’s staff had been augmented by members of the Chicago police, including Conrad, who nodded a greeting when he spotted me.

The attendant was flustered, not used to this kind of spotlight. Conrad took the questioning away from the security chief.

“You’re not in any trouble, son, but the girl may be in danger, so we need you to think calmly. How sure are you?”

He was pretty sure, yeah, well, during the game not much happened at the gates, you reminded people that once they left, they couldn’t come back in, and other than that, he and his buddies, they kind of hung out.

“Right,” Conrad said as the security chief started to demand what “hanging out” meant. “What time would you say you saw the girl leave?”

The attendant couldn’t pinpoint it, more than to say around the start of the second period. “Because by the third, with the Hawks on cruise control, you start to get a lot of people leaving, trying to beat the traffic.”

“She seem to be leaving under her own steam, son, or was someone forcing her?” Conrad asked.

The attendant hesitated. “She left alone, for sure, but maybe a minute or two later two guys left, too. I started telling them the policy, you know, no reentry, and they told me to shut the f– up.”

Conrad and the security chief tried a dozen different ways to get the attendant to describe the two men. The attendant became more and more flustered: he saw so many people every night, it was a miracle he even remembered this pair. Conrad finally let it go, his shoulders sagging.

OLYMPIC TRYOUTS

One in the morning, sitting in the cold walkway at the United Center. Conrad and the cops had taken off, Pierre had called Tintrey, one of the biggest of the private security firms, and was out in a car with them, driving the streets around the Stadium.

The security staff were getting ready to shut down the building for the night. The security chief was sympathetic: everyone felt devastated by Bernie’s disappearance, but she wasn’t in the building; I needed to leave.

I got up, my legs so stiff I lost my balance. I clutched the handrail along the wall, my bleary eyes not registering what I was looking at, the shuttered food stands, the garbage that the cleaning crew was shoveling into bags, the aisle numbers going dark as the interior lights were shut off. I was standing near 201, which was blinking at me, the bulb inside getting ready to die.

“Know how you feel,” I muttered.

I had a feverish urge to join the cops and Tintrey Security in driving the city’s streets, the way one does in hunting a missing wallet: it could be here, have you looked there?—even if the police organized a search by quartering the vicinity and fanning out from there they couldn’t cover the buildings, the bridges and tunnels. You need some kind of hint or clue and I had nothing to contribute.

My day had started with Mr. Villard’s shooting. My encounter with the Evanston police seemed part of the dim past, as if it had happened to someone else many decades earlier. I was so worn that I would be more of a hindrance than a creative help in a search. I drove home. Maybe I’d sleep, maybe I’d wake up with an idea.

“Don’t beat yourself up.” I repeated Conrad’s advice as I climbed the back stairs to my place. “Plenty of time for that later. Anyway, Pierre is doing it for you.”

He had looked at me with something akin to hatred, cursing me in two languages for involving his daughter in my criminal affairs. I was so tired that even fear and self-recrimination couldn’t keep me awake. I fell into those fever dreams, where your eyeballs feel scratchy and you only skim the surface of sleep. Viola was chasing me on a Harley . . . Nabiyev was pouring cement over my head . . . Vince Bagby invited me to dinner, then stuffed me into the middle of a mound of pet coke. As the dust closed over me, I saw the light over aisle 201 blinking on and off.

I sat up, completely awake. The slip of paper I’d found in Sebastian’s gym bag had the number “131” scrawled on it with the time. Aisle 131. Be there at 11:30 P.M.

The United Center was on my mind. I stopped in the middle of dialing the phone number for the security chief. Sebastian had been going to see the Cubs, not the Hawks, the day he vanished. Aisle 131, that was Wrigley Field. He’d been meeting someone at Wrigley Field in the middle of the night.

The coaster Bernie had brought home from a Wrigleyville bar. It wasn’t underage drinking that had put those mischief lights in her eyes a week ago—she’d been scouting the ballpark. It didn’t make sense—a week ago, she hadn’t seen the pictures, she didn’t have any reason to think Annie had been there. Maybe she only wanted to emulate Boom-Boom’s and my old bravado in climbing into the park and then after she saw the pictures, decided that was where Annie had hidden her diary.

I dressed in black: T-shirt, warm-up jacket, jeans. Rubbed mascara over my cheekbones to keep them from reflecting light, pulled a black cap over my hair. I tucked my pencil flash and picklocks into my pockets, put on a shoulder holster. Maybe I should leave a message for Jake. Everything I could imagine writing made my errand sound embarrassingly stupid at best. In the end, I scribbled,

Bernie Fouchard disappeared midway through the game. There’s a slim chance she went on her own power to Wrigley Field; I’ve gone off to look for her. Please let Mr. Contreras know as soon as you get up. Also Conrad Rawlings.

I went out the back way, slipped the note under Jake’s kitchen door, then ran down the back stairs as quietly as possible. The dogs still heard me. They were lonely for me and for Bernie; they started barking, demanding that I take them with me. I ran on tiptoe down the walk and was opening the back gate before the light came on in Mr. Contreras’s kitchen. As I jogged down the alley, I heard his gruff voice demand to know who the heck was out there, he had a shotgun, keep your distance.

When I reached Racine, the adrenaline that had propelled me out of bed drained away and I slowed to a walk. My legs felt thick and heavy from the hours of climbing around the United Center and I couldn’t force them into anything faster than a kind of shuffling jog.

The predawn air had a bite in it. The calendar said spring, but under the streetlamps I could see the mica in the sidewalks glinting with frost. I should have worn gloves. My fingers were numb and I needed them to be flexible. I thrust them deep into my jacket pockets and tucked my fists around my thumbs.

The bars along Clark and Addison had finally closed for the night. I had the street mostly to myself. I passed a man inspecting bottles that had been dropped along the street, drinking from any that still had a little something left in them. A squad car slowed, shone a light in my direction. My heart beat uncomfortably—not good to be stopped with a blackened face and picklocks. They played their spot along the street, rested it on the guy on the curb, decided he was harmless, turned south onto Clark.

I walked to the back of the bleachers. Gate L stood invitingly near me, but the wooden doors opened inward, with the lock on the inside, no handles, no place I could insert a pick.

I went back to the wall under the bleachers. Boom-Boom and I had made this climb a dozen times, but never in the middle of the night. And not with the overhang from the new rows of bleachers they’d added. Sometime between my reckless childhood and today they’d also put in new bricks, new mortar. No toeholds.

I used my flash sparingly. Even if I could get to the top of the wall, which was about six feet above my head, I couldn’t crawl past the cantilevers that supported the new bleachers. So near and yet so far.

A rattling in the wire mesh around the stands made me flinch. Night nerves, not good, but I risked a quick look upward with the flash. A piece of newsprint had been blown against the fence. Every time the wind gusted, the edge would slap the chain links.

I walked slowly along the street, studying the wall. Right beyond the gate, the shuttered ticket windows offered the only chance for entry. Not a great chance, but if I could coerce my frozen fingers and tired, middle-aged legs into action, it would do.

I studied the layout carefully, memorizing the distances: I’d have to put the light away and judge it all by feel.

I stuck the flashlight back in its belt holder, rubbed my hands together. The palms were tingling.

I can climb this wall. I am fast, smart and strong. I repeated the sentences, tried to pretend I believed them, grabbed the ledge under the ticket window and wedged my toes against the wall, shifted my hands to bring up my right knee, lost my hold, dropped to the sidewalk.

I am smart, fast, but big. Size is not always an advantage—if Bernie had figured out this route ahead of me, her lithe little body would have floated up like a gymnast’s.

I grabbed the ledge, swung my legs up and fell again. My shoulders and hamstrings were already feeling the strain. Turned around, palms on the ledge behind me, pushed down and jumped at the same time, got my butt inserted into the deeper space left by the window, swung my legs over.

Four inches of ledge supported eight inches of thigh, unstable. I moved fast. Balance beam, yes, we used to jump on a beam no wider than this in high school. I straddled the ledge, pushed myself standing. You can still do this, girl, even if it’s been thirty years.

Light from the streetlamps on Clark provided a dim glow, enough that I didn’t need the flashlight to see where I was going. I started a heel-to-toe walk along the narrow ridge, heading for the brick wall underneath the bleachers.

Headlights appeared, reflected in the glass of the building across the street. A squad car making its rounds. I froze, my shape a dark silhouette. If they looked up—they shone their spot on Gate L, some ten feet in front of me, decided it was secure, moved on. The shirt under my warm-up jacket was wet with sweat. The cold wind began turning it into an ice pack against my back. Get in motion, warm those muscles up again.

Someone was coming up Waveland toward me, but I couldn’t stop now. I walked up the wall until my knees were at squat angle, got a hand up, grabbed the clay tiles at the top of the wall. One last hoist, come on, Warshawski, you fast smart detective, do it.

“What you doing up there?”

I was lying on top of the clay tiles, a beached whale. The drunk I’d passed earlier, or maybe a different drunk, was standing underneath me.

“Practicing for the Olympics,” I said. “The wall-climbing event.”

“Seems kind of a funny place to practice.”

“Yeah, I can’t afford a gym.”

I got to my hands and knees. My muscles were wobbly, not good, since I had a lot more stadium to cover. Right hand forward on the sloping clay tile, left knee, left hand, right knee.

“You fall, you gonna crack your head open, no Olympics, no medals,” my companion said. “They got those places on the Internet where people give you money, you say you need to join a gym, they pay your membership.”

I grunted. Crowd-sourcing, what a great idea. Way better to be in a gym than creeping along the clay tiles of Wrigley Field in the dark.

“You ain’t the first to be up here practicing, case you interested,” my friend said, as if the memory had just pinged a neuron. “Other person didn’t say nothing about no Olympics. Maybe they stealing a march on you, or maybe you ain’t no Olympic athlete yourself.”

I sat up, banging a knee into the edge of one of the tiles. “When was this?” I tried to keep my voice casual.

“Oh, tonight. Don’t have me no watch, can’t tell you exactly when, but when I called out, he moved fast, way faster than you, missy. If he’s your rival, you better get your faster moves worked out.”

“He? It was a man?”

“Didn’t ask for an ID. Small kid, might have been twelve or thirteen. Wore one of those big sweatshirts, got caught on the tiles. He moved like a crab through the sand with a kingfisher after him and if you’d a asked me, I’d a said he was breaking in, not training for no Olympics. What about you?”

“I think he was breaking in, too.” Bernie, Boom-Boom’s jersey hiding her breasts, small, agile, looking like a twelve-year-old boy in the dim light.

“Meaning, maybe you breaking in, too. Like the older guys coming after the boy.”

My heart skipped a beat. Two beats. “They climb up after him?”

“They not as spry as you and the boy. They saw him go over the wall. One stood on the other’s shoulders, but he fell over, they both swore a blue streak, then they tried using a crowbar on Gate L here, only then the po-lice drove by, they took off.”

“I’ll tell you a secret,” I said. “I’m not in the Olympics. That’s my kid, running away from home, and I’ve got to find him before he hurts himself. Thanks for the tip.”

The drunk sat on his haunches, watching me. “Yeah, I didn’t figure you for no Olympic athlete,” he said under his breath.

Ignore the grinding pain in the knees where the tiles cut through my jeans. Force the numb fingers to cling to the tiles. Inch by inch, until I felt the metal of the staircase next to me, a sharper shape in the shapeless night. I swung the right leg out and over the stairwell fence bar, slipped, fell backward onto the bleacher stairs.

“Hey! You in the ballpark now!” my cheering squad shouted. “You don’t belong in there, they gonna arrest you, give you fines.”

I didn’t bother responding.

“Hey, you still alive?” the drunk shouted. “You find any beer, you drop it over the wall, you hear?”

I sat up, rubbed my tailbone. Everything in one piece. I’d done the easy part.